I would like to report that, as a committed contrarian, I was less impressed by the theatrical sensation called Hamilton than everybody else has been. Alas, I can’t. Hamilton, which I only saw this past week even though it opened over the summer, is everything you’ve heard—and if you haven’t heard anything, I would like to request an invitation to take a few days’ vacation under the rock where you’ve taken up residence.
Not exactly a musical, not really an opera, not a work of hip-hop, Hamilton is nothing less than the most stirring patriotic pageant of our time or any time (or, in Rob Long’s words, “the best and longest Schoolhouse Rock“). Through song and poetry and dance, it takes us through the creation of the United States in the person of its greatest-ever immigrant, perhaps the most significant practical intellectual of the modern age. The man who wrote the words and composed the music, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is a New Yorker, just 36 years of age, who read Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton and was seized with the understanding that something had happened in the country and city of his birth two centuries ago worthy of earnest celebration in a present-day idiom. So while there is wit and humor in Hamilton, there is no ironic distance. Hamilton’s towering greatness is presented to us without qualification, as is the glory of the cause to which he dedicated his life—the American experiment.
There has never been anything like Hamilton, and we will not see its like again. If you can’t get tickets now, don’t worry; it will run forever, in many cities, and every high school in the country will be performing it over the next century. And yet, as exhilarating and thrilling as Hamilton is, it induced in me a kind of mute despair—the same despair I felt over Presidents’ Day weekend when I took my children to Mount Vernon on a freezing cold Sunday.
A fear has gripped many of us over the past few months, the fear that we are real-life versions of characters in a Philip K. Dick novel who have suddenly been blessed or cursed by the revelation that we have been living in a false reality—that the emotionally and politically capacious United States we love has been stunted and shrunk by the undeniable challenges and setbacks of the new century. Donald Trump’s “make America great again” slogan explicitly suggests America is no longer great, and that the cause of this decline is entirely external to us. It’s Mexicans stealing jobs and raping our women; it’s China and Japan (!) stealing our industries; it’s Muslims stealing our safety.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and (to a lesser but still appreciable extent) Hillary Clinton are suggesting that America, far from ever having been great, is a bottomless pit of historic injustices and inequalities in which oppression and violence and injustice continue to void the social compact, with African Americans under unprecedented police scrutiny, college-age women sexually abused in unprecedented numbers on unfeeling campuses, Muslims awash in hate crimes, and Latinos subjected to world-historical disrespect.
Both critiques take kernels of truth and explode them into giant tubs of popcorn for those who want to believe themselves victims to snack on. They are the dominating messages of 2016, adopted by canny marketers seeking to gain advantage through the selling of perversely comforting ideas that deny agency to the nation’s self-governing citizenry. Alexander Hamilton himself saw this tendency and the threat it posed to the American experiment in the country’s earliest days. Watching the New York state legislature at work in 1782, he lamented that “the inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.”
Walking through Mount Vernon’s exhibits with my daughters, I found tears springing to my eyes at the thought that the office first held by this Olympian man may well be occupied next year by one of these three intellectual, emotional, and moral pygmies who think so little of the country they want to lead. And watching Hamilton and thinking about how the American experiment itself somehow seemed to summon men of greatness when history needed them—from the Nevis-born Hamilton, who only made it to these shores under the unlikeliest of circumstances, to Jefferson and Madison and Adams and Jay and Marshall and Washington himself—brought tears to my eyes as well. Our time seems to have summoned charlatans and rabble-rousers upon us who appeal to what is basest rather than what is greatest in us.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
